The extra money may come in handy as Bacon reveals he took a 15% pay cut at the BBC, one of a host of presenters to have their remuneration reduced as part of the corporation's well-publicised belt-tightening. "Everyone at the BBC has to be sensitive to what's going on out there. I took a pay cut, lots of people did."

His new three-year contract, signed last year, coincided with his switch to a daytime slot from late evening. "In your mind's eye you think this is a promotion, surely I am going to get more money. No, I got less. It's fine. We are essentially working in the public sector at the BBC and lots of people are having their pay frozen and I couldn't see any reason why I shouldn't have mine reduced a bit. I understood."

So what did he think about fellow BBC presenter Chris Moyles's on-air rant about not being paid for two months? "I thought it was great," says Bacon. "I like the fact the BBC allows you to criticise the BBC without firing you. I love it on 5 Live when we do a phone-in about the licence fee, we put on a load of calls slagging off the BBC.

"The only thing I would say is that – given that he is technically a freelancer – two months doesn't seem a remarkable amount of time. I have frequently gone two months without being paid. Five months, yeah. But two months?"

Emerge stronger

Bacon launched his own broadside at the BBC when he became one of the best-known figures to speak out on the threat to 6 Music. "Proposing the closure of 6 Music is naive and confuses the very proposition of the BBC," he tweeted to his 1.3 million followers after consuming, he later confessed, a substantial amount of wine. "6 Music will not only survive but emerge stronger because everyone's about to find out just how much this radio station matters." It turned out he was right.

"I had a meeting at 9am the next day with [BBC director of audio and music] Tim Davie. I told him it might end up on MediaGuardian and then it did, but he was fine. The BBC is quite comfortable with that sort of thing, so long as it's within reason."

The 5 Live move has been hit by delays but is due to take place by the end of next year. "There is still a bit of uncertainty about what will happen," says Bacon. "We are not quite sure of the date and it will be quite complicated – you can't switch off a station in London on Friday and switch it on in Manchester on Saturday.

North of England

"It's an issue because some staff are going and some aren't – the editor of my show isn't going so that will affect my show when it goes there. The principle of the BBC moving a lot of staff to another part of the country, and representing the north of England better, is a good idea. But it's very hard on some staff members who are being asked to relocate, particularly those with kids in schools, which is not an issue I have. Some people are not going to be able to go and that's a real shame for them."

Bacon is contracted to the station until October 2012, so is likely to present his show from the new Salford base for the best part of a year. He briefly considered commuting ("It's only two hours and 10 minutes"), but will rent a flat in the north-west – "I'm not going to steam in and buy a flat, I don't even know Manchester very well" – enabling him to return to the capital for his TV (and 6 Music) commitments. The nature of his 5 Live show, which is on four afternoons a week, means he could travel up on Monday morning and be back in London by Thursday night.

"I couldn't care less what Adrian van Klaveren does with his weekends. The argument seems to be, why aren't these people committing their spare time at weekends to Manchester? As long as they are in the office when they are meant to be, it doesn't matter. I don't know where Adrian Van Klaveren spends his weekends now. We're London-based – would it be a scandal if he spent every weekend not in London?" Except the capital is hardly under-represented by the BBC.

But it may be an issue for Bacon and his fellow 5 Live presenters if guests are reluctant to travel to Salford. "Basically the guests I'll be interviewing will be exclusively from Hollyoaks [filmed in Liverpool] and Coronation Street," he deadpans. "No, I don't know. It's quite a long way away yet. There has been talk of having monitors when we have a big guest who can't make it to Manchester. They will go into a studio in London and I will be able to see them. I suspect there will be a slightly higher proportion of guests down the line, that will be challenging and something we have to work at. But it's not an alien concept."

Bacon first worked for 5 Live in 2003, quitting two years later to take over Neil Fox's drivetime show on Capital. "The remuneration was very lovely," recalls Bacon, and it was also where he met his wife, but the London music station didn't suit him. A year later he switched to Capital's sister station, Xfm, and by 2007 he was back at 5 Live. "Capital is a great brand but I never felt I entirely fitted in. I enjoyed the show but it wasn't a station I used to listen to naturally. On the day I left 5 Live, [its then controller] Bob Shennan told me: 'This morning you were a broadcaster, this afternoon you are a DJ'. It was quite a good line. It did hit home."

Bacon's television CV is as long as both his arms. Making his stand-up debut at the Edinburgh festival last year – broadcast live on his 5 Live show – he said it read like a "parlour game in which you have to list TV shows you've never heard of", including forgotten gems such as Rent Free, Get Staffed, The Big Idea, 19 Keys and Castaway Exposed. His Channel 5 reality show, Back To Reality, was the best of the bunch, he reckons. "Of all the shows I have done, that was really pretty good. But it wasn't that good for the first few episodes and it was sponsored by Heat, so none of the other print media would mention it."

But no matter how many shows he presents, Bacon will always be remembered for Blue Peter, from which he was fired in 1998 after a friend sold a story to the News of the World about him taking cocaine at a party. The damage it did to his career proved fleeting, and within months he was back working as a roving reporter for The Big Breakfast.

"It's irresponsible to talk about it in terms of it being an advantage or a good thing because it was not a good thing, certainly not for members of my family at the time," says Bacon. "But professionally it did allow me to move into different types of television, that's just a fact isn't it? People didn't see me as a traditional kids' TV presenter, for very obvious reasons."

Bacon switched from late-night to 5 Live's afternoon show at the beginning of the year. It was a move not universally welcomed by listeners on the 5 Live message boards, some of whom suggested he lacked the depth of his predecessor, Simon Mayo. But Mayo was not particularly warmly welcomed when he arrived from Radio 1, and now he is the listeners' darling.

"Enthusiastic, a bit childlike, occasionally ironic," is how Bacon describes his on-air style. "I know there are some listeners who don't like me and some of the things I have brought to the programme. If I wanted to stop annoying the minority of people I could strip them out, but it's not who I am and it's not what I want to do. It's not to say I don't care what people say on these [internet] forums, but when nobody's complaining I would probably consider myself to have got a bit too bland."

Bacon's attitude towards the Radio Festival shows the same mix of enthusiasm and irony. "For radio enthusiasts and anoraks the Radio Festival is very much our Glastonbury. Our equivalent of Nirvana at Reading in 1992 is the 'Will analogue radio be switched off for DAB technology by 2015?' session. They are going to be talking about that for years to come."

When Bacon first pursued a career in radio, doing unpaid shifts at BBC Radio Nottingham as a teenager, his exasperated father said he "might as well become a fireman". Does he still think that? "I don't know really. He saw me on Celebrity Juice and Loose Women, neither of which he enjoyed, so perhaps he does wish I had become a fireman." Bacon, on the other hand, sounds as if he is having the time of his life.

"I have enjoyed what I'm doing. It's bloody great fun. In 10 years' time I want to be in more or less the same place. Not necessarily at 5 Live but in a position where I'm having a lot of fun. I just want to enjoy myself."